Feature Oriented Progressive Lossless Mesh Coding

Abstract

AbstractA feature‐oriented generic progressive lossless mesh coder (FOLProM) is proposed to encode triangular meshes with arbitrarily complex geometry and topology. In this work, a sequence of levels of detail (LODs) are generated through iterative vertex set split and bounding volume subdivision. The incremental geometry and connectivity updates associated with each vertex set split and/or bounding volume subdivision are entropy coded. Due to the visual importance of sharp geometric features, the whole geometry coding process is optimized for a better presentation of geometric features, especially at low coding bitrates. Feature‐oriented optimization in FOLProM is performed in hierarchy control and adaptive quantization. Efficient coordinate representation and prediction schemes are employed to reduce the entropy of data significantly. Furthermore, a simple yet efficient connectivity coding scheme is proposed. It is shown that FOLProM offers a significant rate‐distortion (R‐D) gain over the prior art, which is especially obvious at low bitrates.